Dust

Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt was the first scientist to walk on the Moon. Within hours, he became the first person to suffer from lunar allergies. Eyes watering, throat burning, unable to stop sneezing. The culprit was dust: particles so fine they couldn't be brushed off, so abrasive they wore through spacesuit fabric, so clingy they followed astronauts back into the spacecraft and refused to leave.

Nobody had expected dust to be a problem. They were catastrophically wrong.

Dust: The Invisible Enemy explores the engineering nemesis nobody talks about. From the lunar surface to semiconductor cleanrooms, from volcanic ash clouds that ground aircraft fleets to the slow accumulation that killed Mars rovers, this book reveals how tiny particles, often invisible to the naked eye, destroy machines, end missions, and shape the limits of what technology can achieve.

You'll discover why a single speck of contamination can ruin a $500 microchip, how volcanic ash melts inside jet engines and resolidifies as glass, why lunar dust is sharper than anything on Earth, and what engineers are doing to fight back against an enemy that outnumbers them by trillions to one.
The physics is consistent across every domain: small particles behave differently than large ones, vacuum changes everything, and the solutions that work on Earth fail spectacularly elsewhere.

Dust is popular science for readers who want to understand the invisible forces that constrain engineering and the ingenious ways humans fight back.